Education professor champions social studies

She’s happy just spending time with her dogs at home, but a bit of external recognition for her work in academia never hurts.

No stranger to awards, Lynne Boyle-Baise, professor of curriculum and instruction in IU’s School of Education, can add one more to her list.

The National Council for the Social Studies awarded Boyle-Baise with the 2011 Jean Dresden Grambs Career Research in Social Studies Award.

Much like the award’s namesake — Grambs is famed for highlighting discrimination against female children in American textbooks — Boyle-Baise received the award after years of contributions to the field of social studies education.

“I believe civic education is incredibly important to our youth,” Boyle-Baise said. “Democracy education is not something that happens by itself. We have to prepare our youth for that in school.”

Boyle-Baise places particular emphasis on the presence of social studies education in elementary schools. She said that in the current age of No Child Left Behind and increased emphasis on standardized tests, where math and reading rule the agenda, social studies instruction often falls by the wayside.

She’s on a mission to revalue the disappearing subject, she said.

“The award is related to work in regards to service learning, which is a way to teach youth service ethics,” she said. “I help people who are trying to become teachers, so they in turn can help youth develop a more democratic world view.”

Though she has been an undergraduate- and graduate-level professor for the past 18 years at IU, Boyle-Baise is by no means isolated in her classroom. She’s just as likely to be found engaging with teachers and students in a second grade classroom as she is to be in a lecture hall, she said.

By reaching out to not only students but to current educators, Boyle-Baise is able to more widely instill the importance of social studies education, through which she believes students learn the basic principles of civility and liberty.

She wants to help teachers make social studies more interactive, going beyond rote history lessons and instead showing students how local happenings shaped and were shaped by national events.

It is this mentoring spirit that inspired Shaun Johnson to nominate Boyle-Baise for the award.

Johnson, Boyle-Baise’s former graduate student and current assistant professor of elementary education at Towson University, came across the application for the NCSS award online in the spring.

Boyle-Baise immediately came to mind.

He solicited letters of endorsement from colleagues, which came back in force despite a short notice, in addition to many additional application requirements.

“They were more than willing to do it and happy to do it,” Johnson said. “The strength of the nomination letters shows that she develops great relationships with others, and that she’s made a great mark on her disciples. She doesn’t give herself enough recognition, so other people have to do it for her.”

Upon notification that she had been selected, Boyle-Baise was pleasantly surprised, as Johnson had kept her nomination a secret.

“Every time I get a thank-you letter from a former student, it makes my day,” she said. “Those cards in the mail mean more than people think that they do. And of course, Shaun doing this is a testament. That is almost more meaningful than the award itself.”
Johnson said he’ll never forget the way Boyle-Baise interacted with him and his
fellow students.

“It’s strange, but she really treated us as equals,” he said. “She took as many of our ideas as she gave us hers.”

She sees the relationship quite similarly.

“The best I can do for doctoral students and undergrads is to treat them as my equals,” she said. “Sometimes I learn the most interesting things about democracy and being a citizen from my students.”

The two will reunite in December at the NCSS annual conference in Washington D.C., the same convention where the two originally met in 2005 — Johnson as a grad school applicant, Boyle-Baise as a conference attendee.

There, Boyle-Baise will officially receive her award and lecture on her own research and educational philosophies.